How provable is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Gordon's Garden Tomb - Jerusalem, Israel

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Question: How provable is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ?

ATP: Very. The writings from the Bible about Jesus and his Resurrection are not just religious material, they are the written accounts of eyewitnesses. They were written early, that is at a time relatively close to the event and were well known and widely circulated through out the ancient world.

Flavius Josephus, the great Jewish historian, alludes to the Resurrection in his work of history which was written at approximately the same time as the Gospels.

These facts are important as is a third one:

There is no written record of the day, contradicting the facts of the Resurrection.

That is to say, no one of that era, having read or heard about what the Gospel writers and/or Josephus had written, sat down and wrote a rebuttal explaining why claims of the Resurrection were false, or that they knew where the body of Jesus was and so on.

If some one today were to write that John F. Kennedy was still alive and had not been killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, eye witness accounts, historical news accounts and the known location of Kennedy's remains would refute their claim immediately.

Yet no historical record exists from the time of Christ that would refute the facts of the Resurrection as stated in the New Testament.

Gordon's Garden Tomb

Further, from the first and second century there is evidence on the positive side, literally chiseled in stone, of people having made pilgrimages to Jerusalem to visit the site of the Resurrection. Clearly people from very early on believed in the Resurrection of Christ--the very people who would have had the best access to any historical information refuting the Resurrection if such evidence existed.

On two trips to Israel my wife and I stood at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem where the Resurrection most likely took place. The Garden Tomb has a name that it easy for me to remember. It is called "Gordon's Garden Tomb," named after the British officer whose last name was Gordon who discovered the tomb.

Just as the Scripture says the Garden Tomb is located at a place that would have been outside the ancient city gates, and at the intersection of two busy ancient roads.

There is a stone bluff there that clearly has a rock formation in the appearance of a skull, which is what Golgotha means. Some of the details of that stone have no doubt been altered by weather over the past 2000 years, but the general shape of the stone would not have changed.

Adjacent to the tomb was an ancient garden, just as recorded in the gospels; a garden with a 250,000 gallon cistern chiseled out of the stone dating back to the first century.

On the stone wall over the entrance of the tomb, there is evidence of a chiseled archway that supported what was the roof of likely an ancient church building dating back to the first or second century.

Under the arch, chiseled in the stone rock face, are Christian symbols also dating back to the first or second century, and there is a drainage trough chiseled in the "floor" just outside the tomb, that drains to an area where it is thought that Christian baptisms were done by ancient worshipers.

Is the Resurrection provable? Easily. The historical and archaeological evidence for the Resurrection of Christ is overwhelming, and there is no evidence to contradict it.